


swallow the sea

by ohmygodwhy



Series: first rule of earth kingdom fight club... [2]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Uncle-Nephew Relationship, ozai's a horrible father, zhao? still a bitch, zuko and his utter refusal to ever die
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-18
Updated: 2019-02-18
Packaged: 2019-10-30 06:22:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17823539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohmygodwhy/pseuds/ohmygodwhy
Summary: Zuko refuses to die in the middle of the spirits-damned ocean. If he’s gonna die, he’ll die on solid ground.(“Now, don’t think I’m gonna give you all the secrets - can’t have you beating me,” the earthbender laughs again, “But if you wanna beat rock, you’ve gotta be like a rock yourself. It’s not all about big muscles or fancy moves. If you wanna beat rock, be one.”)





	swallow the sea

**Author's Note:**

> more of me self-indulgently throwing around self-indulgent zuko shit bc my birthday was last month so.......i deserve this. i got attached to this fight club idea so here's me tossing it in again. not necessary to read the other fic, but it'd prob make a little more sense
> 
> anyway its 4 am so i'll edit this mess tomorrow!

 

1.

The first day on his new ship, Zuko can’t get out of bed. He sleeps for most of the day; when he does wake up, he’s exhausted and aching and drained. 

(His eye aches. His eye stings so bad. He’s been burned before, of course he has, but never this deep. It doesn’t feel like it will ever stop hurting.)    
  
Sometimes when he wakes up, he’s alone, but mostly, his uncle is there. He’s holding his hand, his old, shaky fingers curled around Zuko’s. His head is bent, or in his hands, or he’s looking at the bandages wrapped around Zuko’s face with this deep, deep sadness. He can feel that gaze more than anything, searing into his eye the way his father’s hand did. He doesn’t want to know what he looks like to his uncle right now, if he looks like a wreck or a failure or a child, so he closes his eyes against his uncles stare and lets himself fall back asleep.    
  
He’s woken up to the smell of soup and green tea. Which is a strange combination that reminds him both of the palace dining hall and his uncle’s quarters back home.    
  
“Nephew,” Uncle says, touching the back of his hand to Zuko’s forehead. “You need to eat something.”   
  
Zuko doesn’t want to eat something. He doesn’t want to move; he doesn’t want to speak. He doesn’t want to wake up.    
  
“Prince Zuko,” Uncle says when he stirs, voice somehow gentler than before. “My nephew. You need to eat.”   
  
“I don’t want to,” Zuko slurs, too fucked up to use his brain to mouth filter.   
  
Uncle’s eyes droop, like his sadness drags them down. “Zuko,” he sighs, “You must keep your strength up.”   
  
Zuko feels like he will never be strong again, gripping his uncle weakly to sit up. He can’t even do that for long, collapsing back into his pillow when Uncle props it up. He feels like he will never be whole again; no amount of soup is going to do that for him.    
  
But Uncle looks so so sad, and Zuko doesn’t want to make him any sadder after this horrible, horrible day. So he swallows his shame and lets Uncle help him sip the little soup he can stomach. He’s just tired; he’s so, so tired. He is nothing anymore, and has nothing, and will never have anything again. His father has hurt him and his father has sent him away and Zuko knows that it’s his own fault.    
  
He is so weak and so tired, so he lets Uncle smooth his hair back gently, careful not to disturb the bandages, and lets Uncle hold his hand and whisper things that Zuko can’t hear and doesn’t think he wants to.    
  
The first day is not the worst, but it’s up there.    
  
The  _ worst _ worst might be the day he sees his scar for the first time, ugly and branding and noticeable from a mile away. He doesn’t recognize himself. He doesn’t know who in the world he’s looking at. He’s looking at something ugly and twisted up; the scar curls around his skull, his ear, his father’s thumb burned into his temple. He held him in place by his hair and burned his lesson into Zuko’s skin.    
  
Zuko can’t breathe, and he breaks the mirror, and doesn’t flinch at the glass digging into his knuckles because all he can think about is how ruined he is and how much he wants to cry.   
  
He doesn’t cry, not even when Uncle rushes in at the sound and wraps Zuko’s hand and helps Zuko work through his panic. Helps him control his breath and stop his hands from shaking because he’s pathetic and weak willed and just all twisted up. He doesn’t cry, because he cried enough after the Agni Kai, cried enough his third night on the ship, when he slept most of his exhaustion off and everything came rushing back all at once. He isn’t a child anymore - he feels a lifetime older - so he won’t cry like one anymore.

He doesn’t look at a mirror for the next week after that; by then he’s recovered enough to walk by himself, to go outside and speak to the crew and get used to half of his peripheral vision being pretty much gone, so he learns to tie his hair up without looking and adjust his clothes without seeing them, and does his best not to think about it, even when his crew members double take when they see him and look at it too long, or fold their hands uncomfortably and look away. 

It doesn’t matter, he tells himself. It doesn’t matter what he looks like, or what people see when they look at him, because he has a job to fulfill and things to do. He doesn’t have time to sit around and be insecure about a lesson he had to learn. Better to move the hell on. 

“Your majesty,” his lieutenant said one day, approaching him cautiously.

Zuko peered up at him, because he was still annoyingly small in the beginning. “Yes?”

The lieutenant had paused, and bowed, and cleared his throat. “I just wanted to make it known that, well, nobody here thinks any different of you. We still acknowledge your status, even though you’re -- exiled.”

Looking back, Zuko’s sure it was mostly pity, and mostly because he was still too young. Still, he had swallowed, and stood up straight, and said, “I appreciate it. But I’m not worried about what people think of… of it. That’s their problem, not mine.”

The lieutenant had tilted his head, eyebrows rising in surprise, and he bowed again, body jerking forwards like he forgot how exactly to bow for a moment. “You’re right, Prince Zuko. Talk is just talk.”

“Talk is just talk,” Zuko repeated, liking the sound of it. How solid and confident it felt. 

Talk is just talk. Zuko isn’t much good at talk, either way. Clumsy with his words when he stops being clumsy with his body. 

Talk is just talk. Talk doesn’t matter all that much in terms of action, and action is what Zuko needs.

 

2.

His third week at sea, he’s up and moving, even though the bandages haven’t come off yet. They won’t for a while longer; the palace doctor had given Uncle very specific instructions on the timeframe and treatment of Zuko’s burn, and Uncle was sticking to it with a seriousness Zuko wasn’t used to from him. Like it was important, like it was imperative that Zuko be able to see with that eye. Because there was a chance, he had heard, that if the burn had been any worse, he might have lost vision in that eye for good. But his father is good with his fire, knows just how much to use to sting Zuko’s wrists or the back of his neck, and just how much to brand but not blind. 

The point is, he’s mobile mostly because he can’t stand to be stuck in bed any longer than he has to be. Uncle is almost always hovering, like he’s afraid Zuko will collapse from the inability to be half blind or something, but Zuko still finds a way to sneak away sometimes.

Even though his crew isn’t very big - it’s a small ship, and he’s in exile, after all - there’s always something going on. Someone is always doing something, and nobody really seems to mind if he watches them do their job for a few minutes. He never stays for long, but he watches, and decides that he wants to know how to do the things his men know how to do. Even if he isn’t planning to live on the ship long, he should know how to run it. 

Eventually, when one of the men who mainly patrols and like, shovels coal, is practicing his fighting forms below deck - he isn’t a firebender, so the forms are different - Zuko decides to say fuck it and steps up and asks, “Show me how to do that?”

It comes out as more of a statement than a question, but he thinks the man would look shocked either way. “E-Excuse me?” he stutters.

“The way you punch is different from bending. I want you to show me how to punch like that.”

The man blinks, twice, and then seems to shake himself. “Your majesty, the way I fight isn’t very…  traditional. I learned in my village, not in any school.”

A few months ago, Zuko wouldn’t have dared to try to learn anything outside of the palace’s regiment, save the way he practiced his swords in secret, because he knew his father wouldn’t allow it. His father isn’t here now, and Zuko’s never been good at keeping him happy anyways.

“That doesn’t matter,” he says. “I need to know how to fight, even without my bending.”

The man bites his lip, glancing at the door like someone might be listening; like this is a test. “Your majesty… I don’t think your esteemed uncle would want me to teach you how to fight like a colony boy.”

“You answer to me, don’t you? Not him. Besides, my esteemed uncle isn’t here right now.” When the man doesn’t respond, Zuko hesitates, “Please,” he says, keeping his voice steady. “I need to learn.”

The man finally looks at him again, searching his face for something, and bows his ascent. “Yes, your majesty. Um, the first thing you need to learn is your stance. It’s a bit different from a firebending stance, but the basics are the same.”

The man is a very good teacher. By the time the bandages come off and they’ve hit two of the Air Temples, Zuko can almost beat him in a spar.

A year into the banishment, the man gets drafted by his hometown, and has to leave to fight somewhere else, even though Zuko is technically supposed to have priority over the army. Zuko’s surprised to find that he’s sad the man is leaving, even though the first thing he learned about battle is that you can’t get attached to the people under you, because you’re sending them to die. Zuko wasn’t planning on sending these men to die, not the way he served those new recruits a death sentenced the second he opened his mouth, but the universe has a way of doing exactly what he didn’t want it to do.

“Don’t forget,” the man says before they leave him at the dock of an Fire Nation colony, “your stance has to be loose, but your punches have to hit hard.”

“Don’t die your first day there,” Zuko says, and it’s an order, not a suggestion. Even though Zuko doesn’t think most of his crew like him very much, especially not by the end, the soldier still bows to him, and tells him that he won’t. 

Zuko watches him leave until he’s out of sight, and then turns back to the task at hand.

Over the next three years, Zuko learns from Uncle how to keep his body warm with his breath, even in the snow, and he learns from the lieutenant how to read a map better, how to map the stars, learns from one of the mechanics (and the term mechanic is used very loosely here) how to pickpocket, a talent which might have gotten him stuck with a job on the banished prince’s ship, and learns from one of the other, actual mechanics how to fix an engine and shove a pipe back into place. It’s nothing he ever would’ve learned back home, and he feels a strange sort of pride when he thinks that Azula wouldn’t know how to do any of these things. 

He practices with his blades until he’s probably better with them than he is with his bending. He keeps getting stuck at the basics; Uncle refuses to teach him anything further, talking about how now that Zuko can’t see the same, can’t hear the same, that he needs to relearn the basics to fit his needs. 

Maybe he’s right, because it takes Zuko months until he’s comfortable enough to let even Uncle stand on his left side, where Zuko can’t completely see him. It take him longer to retrain his left arm to work without the ability to be visually aware of the space over his shoulder that he used to be able to see with a twist of his head. He has to relearn how to let fire exist on that side, because that first week - that first month - had him flinching away from heat coming anywhere near his face. Not a candle, and definitely not any bending. He could barely bend with his left hand without shaking so bad he could’ve accidentally burnt himself again. 

But  _ spirits _ , the firebending basics had taken him so long to master the first time. He didn’t want to go through it all over again. He took to goading the lieutenant or one of the mechanics into teaching him something new, some navy trick, something they didn’t teach royalty. He learned how hot you have to burn to melt metal, and how to at least try take hold of someone else’s fire - which scared him at first, the idea of someone moving his own fire against him. 

He learned things that his uncle wouldn’t be glad to know he learned, but Zuko figured that his uncle was disappointed with him enough already, that one more thing wouldn’t make a difference. 

He needs all the tools he can get, everything he can find, to face the Avatar. When he finds him, he needs to be ready. He needs to be strong. He needs to not cower or run away.

Once, near the beginning, Zhao had said to him: “If you ever do find the Avatar, do you plan to cry and beg him for mercy the same way you did with your father? Maybe he’ll burn your other eye.”

Zuko had bit his tongue so hard it bled, leaned forward and said: “I will never beg for mercy again. When I become Firelord, maybe I’ll burn  _ your _ eye out for your insults.”

When Zuko does get the opportunity to burn him, to throw all his shit back in his face, to pass on what has been done to him, he doesn’t. He can’t. He thinks that beating Zhao and refusing to finish the job is humiliation enough for the man. Being beaten by someone half his age, by the prince who’s banished. He hopes someone gossips about it. 

The point is that he was weak, and stupid, and naive, but he’s not anymore. He worked hard, and learned, and now he’s strong. 

The Avatar is twelve years old, and Zuko doesn’t know if anything he’s been working for has been worth it. 

 

3.

After the crushing Fire Nation defeat in the North, Zuko and his uncle drift on their shitty little raft at sea for three weeks. 

It isn’t horrible at first - no, it is horrible, actually. The first few days they’re floating through the wreckage of what was once a solid chunk of their nation’s navy. The broken carcasses of war ship and cannons and dozens and dozens of soldiers, floating in the water. The human body doesn’t sink easily, Zuko finds out. He’s sure there must be more than what he sees - he watches the weight of the armor drag many of them down eventually - and that makes him ache with grief even more: the knowledge that they’re floating on a graveyard. 

His own people are buried in the ocean below him, and they will never have funerals, their bodies will never be burned. He’s heard stories of people who’ve died without a ritual funeral afterwards, no one to burn their bodies or speak their grief allowed. No words about their life or their family. Usually, in those stories, the people’s spirits aren’t able to move on and join the spirit of the sun in the world beyond. They’re stuck in the normal world, the living world, because there was no one there to guide them to the other one. Sometimes they become vengeful spirits, taking their fates out on the living, and sometimes they just grieve forever. His mom used to cover his ears when Azula tried to tell him those stories, but he always snuck out after dark to have her tell him anyways. He heard plenty of ghost stories his three years on his ship. 

He thinks of those stories, and wonders if the soldiers buried deep in the ocean will be stuck there forever, with the remains of sunken ships torn to pieces by the moon and the Avatar. He imagines their spirits gazing up at him, their failure prince, and wishing they could pull him down with them. He thinks of Zhao being swallowed by the ocean, thinks about being so utterly  _ disgusting _ to someone that they would choose death over accepting his help, and wonders if that bastard wishes he could’ve stuck around to haunt him, too. 

It takes five days for them to get past the floating graveyard. By then, Zuko has searched every soldier he saw for a familiar face - for one of his crew. For the lieutenant or the captain or the mechanic who taught him how to fix an engine. By the time the ghosts are behind them, he hasn’t seen a single one of them; he can’t decide if he feels relief that he couldn’t find them, or dread that they might be at the bottom of the ocean instead.

Before they’re out of range, he manages to snag a piece of metal bent up and curved enough to work as a bowl. Once, the captain told him that boiling salt water makes it drinkable; he wonders how many people got fucked over before anyone realized that.

Uncle smiles at him when he presents the metal like it’s something valuable, says :“that’s good thinking, nephew.”

Uncle’s not doing so good out here - “I’m too far past my prime to go on this kind of adventure anymore” he says, laughing weakly - so Zuko boils as much water he can scoop up and lets Uncle have all of it. 

“If we only had some tea leaves,” Uncle says, holding the bent up metal bowl with the same poised dignity he has holding smooth porcelain, “This would make a fine drink.” 

Zuko tries to smile, but can’t quite manage. Water is important, because dehydration is probably the least honorable or interesting way to go, but it doesn’t offer any strength. There’s no substance. Even tea gives you  _ something _ . He needs to catch something before Uncle keels over or Zuko’s strength runs out. Because he can feel it running out. He has nothing to fish with, barely knows how to do it anyways. He lies on his back, and thinks he sees vulture-seagulls way up in the sky, circling like they’re waiting for them to roll over and die.

It’s that thought that strikes something in him: everything he’s done, everything he’s worked for, and he’s just gonna lie down on this stupid raft and wait to starve to death? Three years on his tiny, beat up war ship - with its stupid heater that gave out every winter and its tiny kitchen and the engine that never shut the hell up - and he’s gonna burn himself down with it? Zhao tried to blow him up and Zuko refused to drown; is he gonna let the ocean get to him instead?

Fuck no. He pushes himself up, kicking his legs over the edge of the raft, letting the cold shock of the water wake him up. Snaps himself the hell out of it. 

Uncle doesn’t stir when the raft bobs in the water, and Zuko’s heart skips a beat. He has to do something; he can’t let them die here. 

No, he decides. He refuses to die in the middle of the spirits-damned ocean. If he’s gonna die, he’ll die on solid ground.

When the birds fly too low, Zuko takes his shot. He gets two of them, and Uncle wakes up when he shakes him this time. He smiles gratefully when Zuko shows him what he caught, says: “very good, Prince Zuko, very resourceful”. 

The birds last them three days. 

Over the next week and a half, Zuko creates a system for the two of them: Zuko sleeps during the day, tracks the stars at night; he uses his shirt to make a messy little sail, and when it ends up being useless without any spirits-damned wind, he ties it to the bottom of the raft like a net. It works about as well as you’d expect, but it works a bit. He boils water in the morning and at night; lets Uncle have most of it, lets Uncle sleep - but shakes him awake every few hours, because he’s been sleeping more and more and Zuko is getting more and more afraid that maybe one of these days he’s not going to wake up.

When he finally spots land, it takes everything he has not to dive into the water and swim there himself. Uncle can’t swim right now. There’s wind  _ now _ , and of course its pushing them in the wrong direction, further away from the shore. 

Shit. Shit. He doesn’t have rope, doesn’t have an anchor. Doesn’t have shit, except his bowl and his body and his bending. 

He pauses. Remembers Azula showing him - showing off - how she could move, shoot fire from her fists to shoot her across the floor, like she was gliding. His arms aren’t strong enough for that, but his legs… 

He scoots to the edge of the raft and leans back. He grips the sides tight, pulls his knees up, and kicks out as hard as he can, shooting out as much fire as he’s able. Miraculously,  _ ridiculously _ , it works. The momentum of it shoots them forwards, towards the shore. When they start to slow down, he does it again. His legs ache from the strain, weak from being inactive for so long, but he pushes again and again. When he’s close enough to the shore to stand, he jumps off the raft, splashing into the water and finally, finally, landing on some actual solid ground. 

He drags the raft after him, tugging it slowly but surely onto the shore, and collapses into the sand. 

Spirits above, but he could cry. He hasn’t been to a beach since he was a child. The sand is rough and familiar and grainy against his skin. He’s never been so fucking happy to have sand stuck to his wet clothes. 

“Please,” he says after he manages to drag himself back up and stumble further onto shore; there’s a road past the trees, and a carriage riding by. He waves his arm weakly, “Please. Please, my uncle needs help.”

The two men in the carriage look at his scar, look at each other and, thank the damn spirits in the sky, follow him down to shore to help him. 

Honestly, he thinks. All this time spent at sea and it still tried to kill him. Fuck the ocean. 

 

4.

He likes the Earth Kingdom much more than he likes the Water Tribes. For one, there are no giant angry moon-ocean-spirit things, and there’s no snow either. He’s spent more time in or around the Earth Kingdom than anywhere else in the past three years, because they have open ports and enough of the cities are under Fire Nation control that he could dock for a few nights or buy supplies in a lot of them. 

He’s never been this far inland before, save the times he had some vague lead that led him to some cold trail. There were a lot of those, before the Avatar came back. He used to chase stories around, like a child who still thinks that things will come true if you just believe hard enough. 

He believed hard enough - and the Avatar did show up eventually, so. The universe has a way of really twisting your expectations. 

He’s getting the shit kicked out of him for the third time that week when that thought hits him. He wanted to go home so badly, and now the only way he can do that is as a prisoner. He wanted to find the Avatar more than he wanted to eat and sleep and breathe some days, and now the Avatar’s twelve years old and capable of destroying half a navy in a matter of minutes. And now he’s in some random Earth Kingdom town, getting the absolute shit kicked out of him in front of an audience because he hasn’t learned enough yet and he needs to get at least one more win in before he skips town. Uncle did always say to learn from the people around you. Zuko’s always been better with hands-on experience. 

So his third match he gets kicked to the spirit world and back, and lets one of the other regulars pat him helpfully on the back while he tries to stop his nose from bleeding. He can’t tell if he prefers all the sore bruises and bloody noses to the burns he’s so used to, or vice versa. Different elements bring on such different pain. He doesn’t know if the familiar is better, or if the new kind of hurt is something like relief. 

He’s… relieved to know there’s other kind of pain in the world. Or something? Obviously he’s not glad there’s so much of it, but it’s relieving to know that not all of it hurts as much as fire does; not all of it leaves such a hideous mark as burning does. You burn things down, people and towns and everything else, but with earth, you build things up. Earth fucking hurts when it wants to, all solid and unrelenting and stubborn, but it doesn’t burn.

Fuck, does it hurt, though.

“Oma and Shu, kid, don’t you think you should sit out one of these nights?” the regular patting his back says; he’s a big guy, at least twice Zuko’s size, but his pats are gentle.

Zuko, blood tangy in the back of his throat, just shrugs. “Figure I could use as much practice as I can get.”

It’s as neutral as he can be without giving something away, probably; he’s never been good with Not giving things away. 

“Practice doing what, getting your ass kicked up and down the arena?” the regular asks, cracking a smile.

Zuko rolls his eyes in lieu of attempting some sort of smile back, because he thinks any movement might make his nose start bleeding again. The regular huffs a laugh, and pats him on the back again, this time with enough force to jerk him forwards a bit.

“Shit, sorry, kid,” he says, and Zuko really wishes he would stop calling him that. “Y’know, if you wanna win more, you need to work on your stance. I know you’re not an earthbender, but if you wanna beat one like you did the other night, you’ve gotta be solid.”

Zuko looks at him curiously, and tilts his head for him to keep talking.

“Now don’t think I’m gonna give you all the secrets - can’t have you beating me,” the guy laughs again, and it reminds him painfully of Uncle laughing at his own jokes. “But if you wanna beat rock, you’ve gotta be like a rock yourself. It’s not all about big muscles or fancy moves. If you wanna beat rock, be one.”

It sounds like something Uncle would say, like it’s a metaphor but he’s also supposed to take it literally, and maybe that’s why it sticks with him. He thinks about it in his fourth match two nights later, the one that he wins before he has to leave town. It’s not against the guy who gave him the advice, lucky for him, but he thinks he might be out there watching. 

The guy Zuko’s up against is maybe half a foot taller than him, built solid and square, like a rock. If you wanna move rock, be a rock. If you wanna beat rock, be a rock.

Being a rock isn’t as easy as it sounds. Firebenders don’t falter easy - at least, they’re not raised to. One of the first things Zuko learned was not to back away from a fight, but lean into it. Prove your worth, and all that. He’d never been very good at that, as a child, but his father had taught him what cowering got you. His father was always fond of calling the Earth Kingdom citizens savages; turns out he’s been the one telling Zuko to be a rock all along. If Zuko was the type of person who laughed about things like that, maybe he would laugh. But he’s not, so he ducks out of the way of a sharp slab of rock instead. 

The Avatar taught him how to be light on his feet, and the three other earthbenders he fought taught him how to plant himself solid on the ground. They’re opposites, he thinks vaguely, earth and air. If water and fire are opposites, than earth has to be the opposite of air. That’s the element the Avatar has to learn next, now that he’s a skilled enough waterbender to become the ocean spirit, or whatever. 

(He wonders if the Avatar is looking for an earthbending teacher, and if maybe he’s somewhere nearby, before he remembers that the Earth Kingdom is huge, and catching the Avatar won’t do him any fucking good anymore.) 

Fire isn’t the opposite of earth - they must have more in common than fire does with water. The earth is stubborn. Zuko can be stubborn. All Zuko’s been for the last however many years of his life is stubborn - stubborn enough to force his way into that war meeting and stubborn enough to hunt a ghost for three years, stubborn enough to break into the North Pole and stubborn enough to not die of dehydration in the middle of the ocean. He can be stubborn enough to win this dumb fight. 

The guy gets close enough to him to twist his wrist back, but that’s his mistake. Zuko kicks out behind him and catches the guy’s ankle with his foot. He topples backwards; he almost takes Zuko with him, and Zuko used to have slow reflexes but they’re fast, now, so he gets his legs under him and yanks his arm away - spins around and gets a knee in the guy’s chest, a hot hand at his throat. 

After an eternity, the five seconds pass. The guy taps out, and the crowd goes loud as it does when a Not Earthbender somehow wins something. 

The Advice Regular pats him on the back again, this time in congratulations. “You’re a pretty solid rock, kid,” he says, and that’s when Zuko knows he has to leave town. 

He collects his prize money, thank you very much, stays to watch the guy’s match - which he wins - and makes his way back to his little camp near the river outside of town. 

Away from the weird, underground arena, he feels very small. He used to feel small all the time, under his father or his sister, or underneath the night sky hia first few months at sea. He felt small gazing up at the ocean and moon swallowing up his people. He feels small now, because he just won a match and now he has to leave, because people are starting to recognize him, and he’s been seeing more wanted posters. He has three so far - one from when he was exiled, stuck up all over the Fire Nation just to remind everyone he was exiled, one from when he was the Blue Spirit, and one from right now, because he’s a traitor, even though all he’s ever done has been done to help his country. 

The point is that he feels small, and he feels alone, because he left Uncle somewhere in this big, big nation because he’s missing something he needs to find on his own, and for some reason he thinks the best way to do that is to get the shit kicked out of him every other night. He’s never been able to learn anything until it was drilled into him a few times - learn respect, learn the basics twice over, learn how to throw a punch or think like that Avatar or move like an earthbender. 

He thinks about all the years he spent working himself to Ba Sing Se and back trying to master this set or get that move right or do whatever it was he needed to do. Not one day did anyone sit him down to teach him how to read the stars or how to make ocean water drinkable. No one told him that people from another nation were going to be kinder to him than his own. And nobody ever told him to be a rock, whatever the hell that means. 

Whatever, he thinks. Whatever he’s looking for, he hasn’t found it here. 

He’s in another town by morning.

 

**Author's Note:**

> final & complete draft of my thesis due in like a week and im out here writing this instead.............comment to help me get my shit together


End file.
